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Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Finished bag

The lattice bag is done! Hurray! Thanks to over 120 hours of work starting in October of last year (I stopped keeping track for awhile after 96 hours, my best guess at this point is that it took about 125 hours), the major work is finished. I still need to line and assemble to bag, and sort out how I will handle the cord band at the top, but that should not take more than another 8 or 10 hours of work. I hope.

Anyway, the finished bag is about 5.5 inches wide and 11.5 inches tall. It'll be folded in half, so when all is said and done the bag itself will be roughly square. It will be finished with a band at the top and tassels at the bottom so the final effect will be slightly more rectangular. There is a partial write-up on the bag availiable here as a PDF. Once the whole thing is done, it will get it's own documentation. Hopefully for Atlantia 30 Year, but as I will be having surgery a week before and thus not going myself I'm not stressing myself out about that.

I've already started a new brick stitch project based on a German box cover. This one is going to be a book cushion for the book which I won as a prize for the Greenland hood. I actually started at the very end of April, got as far as picking threads and a little embroidery, and then did nothing until yesterday. What you see below is about 10 to 12 hours worth of work, possibly as much as 15. It's much slower going when you have nothing at all on the cloth and have to count out over bare threads with no reference points. Whoever tries to tell you that counted thread work is easy has clearly never really tried it.

As far as the details of the project...again it's based on a 14th century box top and will eventually be a book cushion. The piece is quite large, so I'm working it in cotton rather than silk, over 28 count linen. So far I'm very happy with how it's turning out. The pattern is much simpler to work than the lattice bag, being just basic brick stitch, so my only challenge is counting out a larger pattern repeat than I'm used to dealing with. The first half-row of diamonds was quite a pain, but the the subsequent rows have been getting easier so I have hope. Usually once you get one pattern laid down you don't have to look back at the chart so much, you can just refer to the work itself to see what's next and that makes things move along faster. I am debating weather I want to try putting this in a frame or not, the excess cloth is really sort of a pain to deal with. It's a large enough piece that the frame itself might get in my way too though, so I'm not sure.